The new dilemma for middle-aged men

For a while we were blaming it on the millennium. "We" meaning men of a certain age - say around the 55 mark, say a little older if you wish.

The coincidence of the western world turning 2,000 and our own imminent decrepitude was too great for many of us to bear. Quick, quick, before yet another birthday finished us off, we left our wives and girlfriends, or made it painless for our wives and girlfriends to leave us, and reached out for one last handful of whatever it was we could no longer bear to be without.

In some cases that was simply another wife or girlfriend, in others it was the whole field. The details don't matter, the principle remains the same: we weren't prepared to call it a day yet, the way our parents (or the way we like to think our parents) did.

Now, it's looking as though the millennium was only a pretext. We weren't victims of the calendar at all - neither equinoxes nor celestial magnetism had anything to do with it - we were responding to the imperatives of our natures, allowing that our natures are bound to change if we go on being virile, or at least feeling obligations to our virility for longer. Staring down the barrel of 60, but still fleshy of face and full of juice, the film-star and furniture-maker Harrison Ford flees an apparently happy marriage and starts stepping out with women not only transparently younger than his wife but in some cases, eg Calista Flockhart, actually transparent.

Myself, I think the youth part is a red herring. Men are not as interested in younger women as they think they are. Maybe some of us entertain the delusion that juvenescence will rub off, and maybe others are so ashamed of what they're doing they cannot risk the company of women in possession of sufficient language to pass judgment.

But in the end, whether we run off with one woman half our age or 20 women twice our age, whether we leave home to spend our Saturday nights emptying our wallets into the thongs of exotic dancers in a strip-palace in Wichita County, or our Sunday mornings weeping through coffee concerts at the Wigmore Hall, it all comes down to the melancholy of being a man, and the further melancholy of being a man in what we now have to call late middle-age because we cannot bear to use the word "old".

Sadness is a long time brewing in a man. I do not say this to win sympathy for him. Any astute woman will tell you that she has suffered more from the sentimentality of men than from their brutishness. It's incipient sadness that causes a man to go wandering faithlessly from woman to woman, apparently looking for something he has lost or never found, at the mercy of a chemistry that builds him up, then lets him down, leaving him lying on his back for half the day, listening to what might just be his soul being whistled out of his body.

A good man will damp this nonsense down and get on with what good men do - buying fridge magnets, sending his children to university, and holding on tight to his wife when darkness falls. A bad man will pursue the logic of his unhappiness, shedding tears in as many beds as he can get into. It's because these seem to me essentially the only options for a heterosexual man in our time (I rule out the homosexual option only because it's too late for many of us) that I have set them at each other's throats in my new novel, Who's Sorry Now? Who's the sorrier - that's the question I think it has suddenly become worth asking: the serial womaniser or the doting husband?

And what gives this question its urgency is that the doting husband of our day, taking him to be Harrison Ford's age or thereabouts, and taking him to have doted for a quarter of a century or more, is at this very moment suffering agonies of conscience and indecision, not because he is desperate to womanise indiscriminately, but because he is desperate to womanise a bit. I ask you to feel for him. (I ask you to feel for her, too, but he happens to be my subject.) Once upon a time, nearing 60, he would have been looking forward to resting his ruined body, taking time in the countrywith his grandchildren, looking back proudly over a modest life well-spent. A few regrets, yes, but then again too few to mention.

Now he is likely to go to the gym, is probably more handsome than he was when young, and is certainly more confident. He has friends his age who take Viagra. Something seems to be expected of him. He is subject, from time to time, if not to the solicitations of younger women, at least to their attentions. For this, too, must be thrown into the pot - the greater preparedness of women to say what's on their mind, and also to reach out for what isn't, strictly speaking, theirs.

What is he to do? He adores his wife. He has adored her since school. He would not upset her for the world. But he is upsetting her all the time now, because she feels his restlessness, his returning sadness, that thing they thought they'd put behind them years ago. And the more he senses that she feels it, the more he resents her, and the more he resents her, the less lovely she looks in his eyes ... You can complete that sequence for yourself ...

Call him a bastard, if you like. But you won't be calling him anything he doesn't call himself. And, as for the other one, the bounder who has denied himself nothing, is he the proof that you do better by yourself, and cause less distress to others, if you take whatever it is you fancy when you fancy it? Well, he's still blubbering all over town, if that tells you anything.

But then we all are. The Age of Blubber is how our condition is referred to in my circle. "Welcome to the Age of Blubber," we say when one of us turns 55. And we show consideration to one another by steering clear of whatever sets it off. We avoid films about dying children. We try not to listen to Jussi Bjorling singing from The Pearl Fishers or La BohËme.

So, we are all equal in tears, we who refuse old age, whether we have indulged ourselves in other ways or not, but there is this to be said for the man who has indulged himself the most: at least he doesn't have the ashen look of the doting husband, doomed to break the heart of someone utterly dear to him, or maybe worse, to wear away his own heart with wondering.

? Howard Jacobson's new novel, Who's Sorry Now?, is published by Cape, £16.99.